Quick Link: Public Education On Principle

From Allison Benedikt at Slate comes this delightfully provocatively phrased piece, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person”. This seems like a conversation worth having, and one that really gets to the nub of the “take care of your own versus investment in society” philosophical question.

If anything Benedikt, probably knowing how furiously some parents of cherished, privately schooled offspring will condemn her anyway, overstates the drawbacks of her stance: “But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.” I think if there were a concerted effort on the part of parents who have options to opt in to public school, the change would actually be pretty rapid, for all the reasons Benedikt goes on to detail.

This article may have caught my eye because, despite growing up in a different country with a very different education system, Benedikt and I appear to have followed similar paths, and come to similar conclusions: “My parents didn’t send me to this shoddy school because they believed in public ed. They sent me there because that’s where we lived, and they weren’t too worried about it.” That describes my educational upbringing perfectly, and even though there are times when I feel furious and embarrassed at the ghastly holes in my skills and knowledge, even though my school life was at times a miserable pit of bullying and social ostracism, I have still come out believing in public education. Because if my son has gaps in the education his school provides, I believe I am equipped to find him sources for that part of his development. And in the meantime his school benefits from having kids like him there, and he benefits from not expecting everyone around him to remind him of himself.

So where do you fall in this debate? This topic has the potential to be the greatest sure-fire conversation starter since The Slap.

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32 replies

I went to three private schools (left the first, was asked to leave the second). I think partly because my parents believed it gave me a better education and other opportunities.

I hated it and would not want, even could I afford it, to send my children to a private school. They all seem to want to produce cookie cutter young adults and encourage them only to pursue more prestigious career paths regardless of the aptitude and interests of each child.

I am fiercely pro comprehensive, co-ed, public education. But I am also very conscious of having grown up in, and now living in, an area of Sydney which has some of the best public schools in the state. My kids go to the same high school that my husband and I went to and that my mother taught at. I honestly don’t know what we would have done about the kids’ schooling if we weren’t living in an area where the choice was so easy to make.

Because if my son has gaps in the education his school provides, I believe I am equipped to find him sources for that part of his development. And in the meantime his school benefits from having kids like him there, and he benefits from not expecting everyone around him to remind him of himself.

The decision is much easier for people who have the ability to help their kids in areas where the school fails but its much harder for those parents who don’t have a good educational background themselves – many migrants for example.
Like mimbles I’m lucky enough to live in area where there are some really good public primary schools so my daughter is going to one of those. I’d have no hesitation about sending her to a private school if that wasn’t the case though, and it might happen for high school.

And in the meantime his school benefits from having kids like him there, and he benefits from not expecting everyone around him to remind him of himself.

I went to a private school (primarily due to lack of flexibility from the public system) for both primary and secondary so don’t have anything to compare too but I think that’s a pretty broad generalisation of private schools. It wasn’t the experience that I had. Intake zones for public schools lead to a narrowing of diversity of student population too (eg must be able to afford to buy/rent a house within the zone).

My sister and brother got dumped in various public and private schools – everything from MLC/Wesley via Melbourne High/MacRob to Sunshine High – because of my [redacted] parental unit’s snobbery and overoptimism about his finances. I don’t know how my brother felt about it, but my sister loathed private school. Once I.P.U had pissed off, there was no question of Mum being able to put me into private school even if she’d thought it was a good idea, so I was stuck with the local high school, which I loathed. I wouldn’t have liked any school, but given a choice I’d have taken a girls’ school any day, because a boy-free world would have suited me fine, however bad the rest of it might have been. Hell, I might even have had some encouragement and help from maths or science teachers, who knows.
That’s why I’m conflicted: in the instance I’d had a daughter (I am child-free by choice) I’d have wanted her to have the chance of going to a girls’ school, but I would really, really like to see public schools given the support they need here, instead of funds and status going to private (and usually church-run) schools.

I believe in public ed as a concept, and education as a right. I just don’t trust the clowns that are supposed to be our leaders to fund it properly, nor the droids and jobsworths who run the schools to do their jobs properly. Having been bullied thoroughly in both the public and private ed sectors, I’m pretty sure that paying teachers to be administrators is both a waste of time and talent. Relying on teachers to maintain play-yard discipline is about the same level of waste.
Fortunately, there are some really good syllabi on the net, many of which are put out by the under-funded bureaucracies of Australia. Google and a parent of average intelligence (and, unfortunately, with a surplus of spare time and patience) should be able to cover the gaps. On the balance, I’d probably send a child into public ed if (and only if) I had the time to make up the difference, and the time to watch the school’s administration like a HAWK.

I went to Catholic schools, because my mother was a fairly devout Catholic. My children go to the local state primary school, partly because when we first started sending them to school we couldn’t afford private (although we probably could now) and partly because we have brought them up without religion and I think it would be pretty confusing for them to be put into a religious environment. There are no non-religious private schools anywhere nearby.
I live in a pretty ordinary middle class area, with a pretty ordinary state primary school (complete with facilities that haven’t been added to much since Mr angharad went to the same school in the 70’s), but I have been really impressed with the professionalism and skill of the staff there. Not all the teachers have been brilliant, but very few of them have been terrible, and some of them have been amazing, especially with the Red-Headed Boy who had a very troubled introduction to school, but is actually doing really well at the moment. So I’m sticking with the state system.
I’ve seen the same argument put about health funding – that if the private health system was abolished and everyone had to use the public system then quality would increase. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. The USA, for instance, pretty much only has state schools, and I get the impression the quality of their education system leaves somewhat to be desired.

I believe you’re mistaken there, angharad. There’s a strong parochial school system in the USA, not just for Catholics but also for Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalists/Southern Baptists, Mennonites/Amish and many smaller religious groups. There is also a strong elite education stream in religiously affiliated private schools. Unlike our current system here in Australia though, these parochial and private schools receive zero tax-dollar funding in the 39 out of 50 states who have passed a constitutional amendment to ban state funding of religiously based schools.

I’ve seen the same argument put about health funding – that if the private health system was abolished and everyone had to use the public system then quality would increase. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. The USA, for instance, pretty much only has state schools, and I get the impression the quality of their education system leaves somewhat to be desired.

Even if you made most everyone use the public school system by defunding the public funding of the private system it would be next to impossible to stop people from using private tutoring for the children out of hours (and those who saved lots of money from not paying school fees would then have a lot of money for private tuition). It’s pretty common amongst the chinese community in Australia to send their kids to after school tutoring even in primary school. Though this also occurs (but I think is less common) even when they send their kids to private school.

That’s why I’m conflicted: in the instance I’d had a daughter (I am child-free by choice) I’d have wanted her to have the chance of going to a girls’ school, but I would really, really like to see public schools given the support they need here, instead of funds and status going to private (and usually church-run) schools.

A couple of decades ago there was a report that said that girls generally do better academically in single sex schools. I don’t know if that’s still holds true, but girls only public schools are very rare – eg. only one in Adelaide that I know of.

A couple of decades ago there was a report that said that girls generally do better academically in single sex schools. I don’t know if that’s still holds true, but girls only public schools are very rare – eg. only one in Adelaide that I know of.

There are plenty of single sex public high schools in Sydney, 3 of each fairly close to where I live. I did grapple with the girls do better on their own while boys do better in co-ed thing when thinking about where I’d send the kids, in the end I couldn’t see, if it was true, how it was ethical to want other people’s daughters to provide my sons with co-ed schooling while wanting single sex ed for my daughter. Even if the idea of a girls only school didn’t fill me with possibly irrational horror.

I grew up a victim of both private (grades 1-6) and public (7-12) education in the USA. Despite my grandmother’s insistence that I should go to the private school because the education was better, I can’t say I saw much difference in the quality of education. The main difference was in the snobbiness of the people and the effort they put into sledge-hammering me into a mold. In both places, I felt I learned more in spite of their attempts to “educate” me than because of it.
I live in an area (suburban NYC, USA) whose communities (and school districts) vary wildly in socioeconomics, race, and ethnicity. The universals:
1. White, rich children always get a better education and more extras than the rest, and poor, non-white kids will get the short of the stick. This is true even within mixed districts.
2. Schools are mainly judged by the kind of kids that go there, not on how well your child will do there. So our district is looked down upon because there are large numbers of black and hispanic kids, even though, due to “enriched” classes and programs, the rich white kids actually get most of the attention.
3. No matter how “good” the local public school is, some parents will decide it’s not good enough for their kids and send their kids to fancy private schools. So the fancy private schools tend to draw mainly from towns like Scarsdale and Chappaqua, whose public schools already have smaller classes, more programs, etc., than many private schools.
(Note: religious private schools are a separate issue, which deserve a separate comment post.)
On the flip side, my experience is that if your kid is not well served by the public schools, the private schools won’t be any better. Both of my kids are “bright,” but have organizational and focus issues which meant that you couldn’t just go through the motions of education and expect them to figure out what was expected and do it. Like me, they learned (in spite of the schools), but did very badly in school. We looked at lots of private schools, but we noticed that none had any interest in dealing with non-standard kids, and the more “progressive” they styled themselves, the quicker they were to show us the door when we mentioned our kids’ needs. In the end, what saved us was when someone divulged to us the existence of a so-called “gifted special ed” program run by the same consortium that handled all the other kids that the school districts didn’t want to have to deal with. We harrassed our district into admitting the existence of the program and then into putting our kids into it. Unfortunately, it was later sabotaged and dismantled in one of the many turf wars that Education is prone to. FWIW, _all_ of the kids in the program were white and from well-to-do families.
Bottom line: I am cynical about the value of public education. I am even more cynical about the value of private education. In the long run, both are about ensuring that the proles stay proles and the scions of the rich and powerful go on to own and run the country for their own pleasure and benefit.

There’s a strong parochial school system in the USA, not just for Catholics but also for Lutherans, Calvinists, Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalists/Southern Baptists, Mennonites/Amish and many smaller religious groups.

Usian here with 12 years of private, religious schooling. The closest grammar school in my neighborhood was the local Catholic school, so there wasn’t too much of a choice. (I went to a public pre-school, then it closed. Most of their students were sent to that school.) I asked to go to the local public high school, but my dad adamantly refused. We really couldn’t afford it; my grandfather paid my overdue tuition so I could graduate. Given that private schooling is the only world I know, I can’t say that I got a better education than I would have from a public school. I was led to believe I did, and then I didn’t question it, but there were big problems with my school that went unchecked. Bullying — nay, sexual harassment — went unpunished, and there was a hierarchal system in place that was impossible to crack if you didn’t come from the “right” grade school (I didn’t) or live in a “good” neighborhood (I didn’t.). The tracking system was taken to new and self-esteem shattering levels. Instead of the usual three, we had six, and the upper tracks consisted of mostly white, middle-and-upper-middle class kids. I realize this probably isn’t unique to private schools (there’s plenty of segregation in public school gifted programs), but the racism and classism within that system was entirely ignored.

Okay, I’m a state school brat. Went to public primary schools and a public high school. I also benefited from public school programs which were put in place to help kids described as “intellectually gifted and talented” during the era I was in school – I was lucky, in that I was being grabbed for what were effectively pilot programs at the time, and I was part of the first batch of primary school children to go through the new systems. The programs are still present in the Western Australian state school system even now.
A point worth noting: I wasn’t living in a particularly prestigious suburb or region when I went into these programs. The south-eastern corridor of Perth (basically, those suburbs which developed along the line of the Albany Highway) has never really been particularly ritzy or flash overall, and the bits I grew up and wound up attending schools in (Thornlie, Maddington, Kelmscott) were pretty much a mixture of working-class through lower-middle-class (with some upper-middle in select patches) seasoned generously with a strong handful of housing commission welfare families.
I wound up qualifying for university, although I’m tempted to think I would have done so anyway, even without the extension classes (certainly those lost a lot of their impact once we got past primary level and into the secondary school system, where it basically turned into “you’re just automatically streamed into the advanced stream for your core subjects”).

@mimbles – I’ve had the same thoughts about segregated education, although in general it gives me a squicky feeling. Also from what I’ve heard from people who taught and attended them, boys’ schools are way too loaded with toxic masculinity.
My eldest is going to high school next year and my in-laws have been pressuring us to send her to a private school – indeed to the same one to which they sent their daughter – and they pretty much admitted the other day it was because of the social cachet.

Yes, single-sex public high schools are common in Sydney and can easily be your child’s assigned local school. In some areas I can imagine having some difficulty finding a co-ed high school.
The other thing about the United States is that (if I understand correctly) there is a local district school funding model, with property taxes funding schools. This means school funding is more closely linked with how wealthy the residents of the local area are. School districts also seem way more independent there, with district bureaucrats (often elected local politicians, since US systems tend to elect rather than appoint senior bureaucrats) able to set curricula at a district level. This might be where Benedikt’s pessimism about rate of change comes from: the work of distributing funding equitably, improving curricula etc would be duplicated district by district. (There’s also some other issues that I think are less prevalent in Australia: under- or non-qualified teaching staff, disciplinary/control tactics like metal detectors and a requirement for clear school bags, more involvement of law enforcement in disciplinary matters. Again, I can see a lengthy reform process being necessary.)
I read a critique of Benedikt elsewhere (in a private discussion forum, so I can neither link nor quote) that amounted to this: it’s possible, maybe probable, that sending middle-class children to public school does not itself constitute useful activism. Middle-class children and parents are just as likely to redesign/redirect the school system around their own needs at the expense of the rest of the student body as they are to redesign it to the benefit of the entire student body. And this may be more likely if the middle-class parents assume control of the funding, hiring, curriculum and so on (which is probably easier to do in the US) because middle-class people — especially people whose expertise in children and in education is limited to being a parent! — aren’t actually the experts on what working-class people and people living in poverty want or need from local schools or from education.
Which is not to conclude that class segregation in schooling is a good thing, just encouragement to move beyond either the idea that a middle-class child is necessarily automatically a gift to their local peers, or that middle-class values and methods of organising always improve schools. (I am not accusing anyone in this thread specifically of these assumptions. I’m exploring this idea.) I would think that being a parent of a public schooled child can be an excellent first step in changing public education or society or one’s own family’s commitment to justice for the better, but not the only step.
This discussion has also been had about homeschooling, and I’m yet to come to a conclusion (probably there isn’t one), but I always enjoy tinderbox’s discussion at Does homeschooling violate liberal values?
At a personal level, I was Catholic-schooled, in the systemic system (for non-Australians, these are schools that are diocese-run but largely public funded and fairly low fee, and other than religious education adhere to a publicly set curriculum). This was due to educational priorities on the part of my mother, but an oddly specific one that she later decided was a bad decision: in kindergarten, the local public school was small and had K and Year 1 in the same classroom, and she thought that would result in bad education. (She since became a schoolteacher and would now recommend combined-grade classes to most parents for most children, although it’s partly that when a larger school needs to create a combined class, they will put fairly independent and self-motivated children in it for the teacher’s sake.) This did not leave me enormously enamored of the relative merits of private education.
I have various friends who were private schooled at expensive prestigious schools and some of the schools have enormous advantages (eg, teachers with PhDs and university teaching experience in their subject area, teachers who head the state exam committees). Bullying and ostracism can be as bad if not worse, although possibly targeting different types of children. Some students feel trapped by the narrowing of options at the end: “so, law or medicine? USyd or UNSW? There are no other options!” (Nice problem to have in many ways, but still a very narrow choice.) And they can be very narrow in what achievements they value in students, some schools valuing academics to the exclusion of almost all else, others sports, etc.

I was public schooled and I am happy with my education. I also came from a home where education was valued and my Mum was a teacher. My kids go to a public school. We have discussed private schooling for high school years but have decided that it is only warranted if (and it is a big if) there is a school that caters to a particular talent of one or both of our kids. At this stage it is looking like they will be going to the local high school but we will look again for Yrs 11 and 12 maybe. The only thing MyNigel has noticed is that the Old Boys Club and to a lesser extent the Old Girls Club is still very much a thing although not as much as it once was..

Middle-class children and parents are just as likely to redesign/redirect the school system around their own needs at the expense of the rest of the student body as they are to redesign it to the benefit of the entire student body.

That’s a really good point. I was thinking in broad terms that even if middle-class parents continue to buy an advantage with private tutoring and after-school classes, they would still be pressing for things that everyone benefits from, like green playgrounds and competent teachers, but student needs are much more nuanced than that.
It’s great to see the mix of Aus and non-Aus experiences here.

A couple of decades ago there was a report that said that girls generally do better academically in single sex schools. I don’t know if that’s still holds true, but girls only public schools are very rare – eg. only one in Adelaide that I know of.

There is precious little actual evidence to support this claim. I spent way too long writing an essay on the pros & cons of sex segregation in education and discovered bugger all evidence that wasn’t based on opinion, or completely uncontrolled studies. There was one good study in NZ, one of the few other countries to have public single sex schools. It found that the apparent advantage of girls in single sex schools was entirely accounted for by the wealth and status of the parents who were able to get their girl-children into them. The study was limited only to academic success, and I couldn’t find a single paper that addressed socio-psychological outcomes at all.
Personally, I’m a public school product, and my kids are in public schools. Our local primary schools are admittedly awesome, but our local high schools are much less so. Single-sex mostly, for a start. I have ethical and educational reasons for not sending kids to single sex schools. The whole “reinforcing a gender binary” thing is right up there, but also, if we are going to segregate kids for educational purposes, we should be doing it for actual educational reasons (like learning style, specialisation etc), not assumed possession of an X chromosome or otherwise. And even then, I think we should be doing it within comprehensive schools, not geographically isolating them.
So I will be (hopefully) sending my kids to a co-ed public high school some suburbs away, which does not mirror the awesomeness of our primary schools, but is ok. I don’t think high school education is really the be all and end all for a person’s life anyway, and the social skills learned in dealing with all types, is a genuine benefit I see from sending my kids to a slightly dodgy (and very poorly funded) public school. But I’m still lucky – this school is slightly dodgy, not dire. If they don’t get accepted there, I genuinely do not know what I will do.

And in case I hadn’t gone on long enough – it’s also not uncommon for private schools, especially expensive ones, to prioritise the results of the school over the interests of the student. They want to be able to show the number of students in high bands within subjects, so they will try to encourage students who might be mediocre at a high level of maths, for example, to do a lower level and therefore receive a higher mark. Since I tend to think education is about what you learn, not the mark you get, I reckon learning more, but gaining a lower mark is better than the opposite.

Middle-class children and parents are just as likely to redesign/redirect the school system around their own needs at the expense of the rest of the student body as they are to redesign it to the benefit of the entire student body.

Definitely true in my district. (USA, near NYC)
My district is big on “enrichment” programs which mainly benefit the children of privileged parents — or the egos of those parent. E.g., an “enrichment class” in 2nd grade which involved writing a term paper based on research on the WWW.
Or the “improved” math curriculum, which (as the district described it) meant having, say, 5th grade math classes use the old 6th grade curriculum. The parents that they were presenting this to — almost entirely well-to-do, white parents — were thrilled that their children would be “challenged” and not bored. But when I asked about what would happen to the kids who weren’t learning the existing 5th grade curriculum, I got empty hand-waving as a response.

The other thing about the United States is that (if I understand correctly) there is a local district school funding model, with property taxes funding schools. This means school funding is more closely linked with how wealthy the residents of the local area are. School districts also seem way more independent there, with district bureaucrats (often elected local politicians, since US systems tend to elect rather than appoint senior bureaucrats) able to set curricula at a district level.

Also true where I live (New York State, USA)
Outside of cities, school districts are independent entities, with school boards elected by the voters in the district, with separate taxing authority (property taxes), but whose budgets/taxes must be approved by the voters each year. Most funding comes from school taxes, though NY State supplies some funding from state tax revenues. The rationale for this is to help poor districts, but the allocation is done via the usual NY State political process, meaning that even the richest districts get some of the bacon.
FWIW, my school district has ~2,800 students, the next district has maybe 1,800.
It also means that districts that are politically disfunctional are educationally disfunctional as well. A district near mine is an extreme example: the population is split between [population group A] who all send their children to [group A] private schools on the one hand and [population group B] who send their children to the public schools on the other. The school board mostly consists of people from [population group A], the student body consists (almost) entirely of [population group B]. The results are predictable.

Or the “improved” math curriculum, which (as the district described it) meant having, say, 5th grade math classes use the old 6th grade curriculum. The parents that they were presenting this to — almost entirely well-to-do, white parents — were thrilled that their children would be “challenged” and not bored. But when I asked about what would happen to the kids who weren’t learning the existing 5th grade curriculum, I got empty hand-waving as a response.

To me that’s a sign that the school isn’t coping with the diversity in ability of students that they have. I think it’s just as much a failure of the system to have a bunch of kids bored with the curriculum because its not difficult enough as it is to have kids struggle to keep up. Streaming in larger schools is probably an option, but I’d guess that’s pretty controversial for Australia (very common in Asian countries even in early primary school years though)
I think that having a wide diversity in schools is more important to me than the public versus private debate (though I’m lucky that it wouldn’t be too much of a burden to pay school fees if I had to). So even within the public school system itself to ensure that there are big and small schools, single sex, co-ed, different learning environments and some specialist schools especially when it comes to things like music where having a critical mass is very important.
Some features around deciding to send my daughter to the public school she goes to were that they start teaching some Chinese (both language and culture) from reception up, are large enough to have a dedicated science teacher, and facilitate private music lessons from mid-primary through the school. The first is probably not something that everyone would be interested in or would want another language/culture but its good that there was at least one school nearby that did.

To me that’s a sign that the school isn’t coping with the diversity in ability of students that they have.

That was my point (and Mary’s.)
Keeping in mind that the “diversity” in question is closely linked to social/economic class.

I think it’s just as much a failure of the system to have a bunch of kids bored with the curriculum because its not difficult enough as it is to have kids struggle to keep up.

Yes, it’s a failure, but you’re ignoring the social/economic class/race factor.
The “kids bored with the curriculum” are mostly from well-to-do families, and their needs are being catered to (by advancing the curriculum.)
The kids who are struggling are mostly from poor and black or hispanic families, and their needs are being ignore — in fact, things are being made worse for them.
And, yes, there are some kids from well-off families that are struggling. But their families are likely to engage tutors and other outside help and still want their kids to get the advanced curriculum. Because Harvard.

Streaming in larger schools is probably an option, but I’d guess that’s pretty controversial for Australia

It’s controversial here in the USA, too. (It’s called “tracking” here.) Because what happens is that resources tend to get devoted to the high-track classes (and kids), while the lower-track kids get written off as ineducable. And poor, black, and hispanic kids are much more likely to get stuck in lower-track classes even when you control for ability.

Streaming in larger schools is probably an option, but I’d guess that’s pretty controversial for Australia

This is a subject I oscillate on constantly. On the one hand, streaming can make managing a wide variety of levels of competency a lot easier. It can help make sure enough support is given to those who need it, while not boring the pants off those who don’t need that support. It also allows kids to engage with kids at or about the same competency as themselves, and can encourage informal collaborative learning.
On the other hand, to quote Bart Simpson, there is the problem of “So let me get this straight, we’re behind the other kids and we’re going slower?” Stronger kids can help weaker kids along, and if well managed, can get a great deal out of that arrangement themselves. Bored children don’t necessarily need to learn the next grade’s content, they can teach other children and thereby gain a deeper understanding of the content at their current grade level. Also, streaming can cause serious logistical problems – how to stream kids who excel in one area, need support in another area and are fair to middling in yet another one?
Good teachers make mixed ability classes work better than streamed ones. Poor teachers usually do better with streamed classes.
So I think I mostly come down in favour of mixed ability classes, but I definitely have moments where I think “a wee bit of streaming would really help here”. The solution is clearly to recognise teaching as the high level profession it is, pay accordingly and then expect and eventually demand great teaching.

[Re: Streaming/tracking] On the other hand, to quote Bart Simpson, there is the problem of “So let me get this straight, we’re behind the other kids and we’re going slower?”

More to the point, there is the problem of diminished expectations (and self-fulfilling prophecy): the school figures, “the kids in the slower classes are all dummies who can’t learn anyway, so why bother?” And resources, attention, and effort get shifted to the faster tracks.
Plus the class & race issue. Which is where this all started.

It sounds like there are very different systems in place between the States (and quite possibly within them). Around here, the Primary Extension and Challenge programme for G&T kids in State schools is a weekly pull-out programme: parents have to provide transport to a different and often faraway site, in work hours, with public transport a pretty unfeasible option, and there is a fee to pay on top of that. Which strikes me as the opposite of resources being concentrated there, and in a bad way: it makes this sort of programme only available to families with various sorts of privilege. No money – no PEAC. No rearrangeable work – no PEAC. Parent has disability that makes the transport arrangements too hard – no PEAC.

I’ll try and describe my understanding of the NSW system, but I’m being cautious because this is really the “Sydney system” (and Newcastle and the Central Coast and probably Wollongong). If there’s a significant public G&T option in regional/rural NSW where I grew up, it is new and I haven’t heard about it.
The system seems to be this: there are so-called Opportunity Classes in the final years of primary school, 5 and 6 (10 to 12 year olds). These are in-school classes, so there aren’t additional transport issues. They are full-time classes, so children who aren’t across-the-curriculum G&T don’t fit the model.
There are also entirely separate public high schools (“selective”, NSW people who use the term “comprehensive” in this thread have I think been intended to contrast them with selective). Selective high schools are rather like university in that you “bid” for a place with your rank in the entrance test, and very popular schools (James Ruse Agricultural (co-ed), North Sydney Girls (obviously not co-ed)) have very high ranks needed, as high as “top 1% of entrance exam takers”. The exam is taken in Year 6, so age 11 or 12. Some selective schools have streams that you bid into and a second stream open to all local students, many are entirely selective. This may require that families seeking comprehensives or children who did not gain or want admission have to travel significantly further than their nearest high school. (In my last two residences in Sydney, the nearby high schools have been selectives. Inner Sydney, in particular, is noted for its lack of comprehensive high schools, presumably because outdated population models have few families living in it, and now the land is expensive.)
Both OCs and selective high schools have admission via standardised testing performance, which was designed to be fair in that it doesn’t privilege students from well-off primary schools which enriched their academic and related performance, but which itself is well-understood by parents to be gameable via tutoring. There are many for-profit out-of-school tutoring programs for primary school students aimed at improving their performance on the high school entrance tests, which is extra unfortunate in that such tutoring is not even aimed at improving their overall academic performance or competence but specifically at taking a particular exam. There are, additionally, some selective public schools that admit on other criteria, by portfolio or audition, such as Newtown High (performing arts) and the Conservatorium High School (music).
Otherwise, comprehensive or not, streaming used to be more or less mandatory in mathematics from the middle of high school on (as in, there were three separate maths curricula from Year 9), and by the final years of high school there were state-wide streamed curricula in both English and maths. There have been significant curriculum changes since, but I think that is still true.

I don’t think we have anything like streaming here (SA). Some high schools have a gifted program, the ultimate result of which, I think, is you can get accelerated through the lower parts of high school and/or end up doing some Yr 11 subjects in Yr 10 and some Yr 12 subjects in Yr 11. You apply for these programs in Yrs 6, 7 or 8 but I don’t know what the criteria for getting in are.

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/private-schools-and-the-art-of-ripping-off-parents-20130903-2t357.html
Some state schools in SA are zoned (you get in automatically if you live in the zone) but also have other students accepted because of their interests or talents. I’m thinking of Brighton High here, which has programs for music and volleyball, so you can audition or try out to get in on that basis. It is a very well thought of school, and the real estate in the zone is pricey. According to real estate agents, a house in the zone will often sell for more than houses just outside the zone.

Yeah, there’s one near us like that – it is in a newish, high demand area, but it has a specialist dance program, and anyone from anywhere can get into it on if they are eligible for that program. I think the school my daughter is going to has a similar cricket program, but I don’t care because they have an observatory, and that is way cooler 🙂

There is an opportunity class 40 minutes from us for years 5 and 6. If our son had sat the exam and been successful we would have had to enrol him in the school 40 minutes away and drive him there and back every day because there is no bus service and he was the only kid from his school interested in trying the exam. Since neither of us work in that town 40 minutes away we decided that it wasn’t practical for us.

Stronger kids can help weaker kids along, and if well managed, can get a great deal out of that arrangement themselves. Bored children don’t necessarily need to learn the next grade’s content, they can teach other children and thereby gain a deeper understanding of the content at their current grade level

I was a very bright kid, and I disagree with this statement entirely. That’s how things were supposed to work at the school I went to (single sex private school to which I had an academic scholarship). I was so utterly bored at school that I underachieved, disengaged completely and started making pretty bad choices about my life. Bored smart kids absolutely do need to learn the next grade’s content – and once they’ve done that, the grade after that, and the grade after that. I didn’t need a “deeper understanding” of algebra once I’d already completely grasped it, and it wasn’t my job as a kid to help the other kids learn – I needed to learn new and stimulating things myself, and depriving me of that opportunity was cruel, and wrong, and held me back from achieving all that I could have achieved.
My brother went to a school with a very different approach. While I was sitting in class so bored that I was engaging in self destructive behaviour – or not sitting in class at all because I’d decided not to show up that day – he was streamed and learning to construct mathematical proofs in grade five. By the final years of high school he was doing Uni subjects. He didn’t get bored, and didn’t behave in self destructive ways, and he stayed engaged and did incredibly well at Uni.
On the single sex education issue, I have an anecdote. In first year English at Uni, we had a relatively large tutorial group for the time, of over ten people. After a couple of weeks, it was apparent that there were several girls who just never offered a comment or took part in the discussion. At some point, our tutor asked us if we had gone to single sex or co-ed schools. The girls who’d been at co-ed schools were the ones who didn’t talk.